NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed the US government knew about UFOs and was covering up its alien knowledge for decades right up until his death.
He was the youngest member of Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program which achieved its goal of putting a man into Earth orbit and returning him safely.
Gordon Cooper exposed ‘UFOs’
Following his NASA career, the aerospace engineer and test pilot made it his mission to expose the government’s knowledge about extra-terrestrial life.
“I keep hearing these stories from credible sources inside the government and they just won’t go away,” he told The Washington Post in 1978.
“I can’t tell you the names of these sources but they’re credible and frankly I think the government should release the information these sources have, no matter what the White House thinks.”
He appeared on The Merv Griffin Show in the same year and discussed a story that the government was “able to keep one alive”.
The astronaut could have been talking about J Rod, a well-known conspiracy about an alien who supposedly survived a UFO crash and worked at Area 51.
NASA astronaut ‘lived with a secret’
Speaking at a United Nations panel in 1985, Cooper claimed he was sworn to secrecy while working for NASA.
“For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts,” he said.
“I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us.”
The astronaut believed the extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews were “visiting this planet from other planets”.
He said they must be “more technically advanced” than Earth and suggested a “coordinated program” to “scientifically collect and analyze data”.
Cooper’s own ‘UFO’ sighting
The astronaut once detailed his own ‘UFO’ experience, saying he saw “this typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic”.
However, his alien counter isn’t widely spoken about. Cooper died at his home in Ventura, California, on October 4, 2004.
The Oklahoma native joined the Marine Corps after graduating from high school and later became an Air Force test pilot.
There, he became fascinated with the space program and was named one of the Project Mercury astronauts in 1959.
The astronaut piloted the Faith 7 spacecraft on a 22-orbit mission in 1963 and went to space for a second time six years later.
He served as command pilot on the eight-day, 120-revolution Gemini 5 mission and traveled a distance of 3,312,993 miles.
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